Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories eBook

“I see you are disposed to give vent to your
native scepticism toward me. But I never knew
the thing yet that I could not do. At first,
perhaps, I should have to depend somewhat upon your
proof-reading, but before many months, I venture to
say, I could stand on my own legs.”

After some further parley it was agreed that I should
exert myself in his behalf, and after a visit to the
pawnbroker’s, where Dannevig had deposited his
dignity, we parted with the promise to meet again at
dinner.

IV.

It was rather an anomalous position for a knight of
Dannebrog, a familiar friend of princes and nobles,
and an ex-habitue of the Cafe Anglais, to be
a common reporter on a Chicago republican journal.
Yet this was the position to which (after some daring
exploits in book-reviewing and art criticism) my friend
was finally reduced. As an art-critic, he might
have been a success, if western art had been more
nearly in accord with his own fastidious and exquisitely
developed taste. As it was, he managed in less
than a fortnight to bring down the wrath of the whole
artistic brotherhood upon our journal, and as some
of these men were personal friends of the principal
stockholders in the paper, his destructive ardor was
checked by an imperative order from the authorities,
from whose will there is no appeal. As a book-reviewer
he labored under similar disadvantages; he stoutly
maintained that the reading of a volume would necessarily
and unduly bias the critic’s judgment, and that
a man endowed with a keen, literary nose could form
an intelligent opinion, after a careful perusal of
the title-page, and a glance at the preface. A
man who wrote a book naturally labored under the delusion
that he was wiser or better than the majority of his
fellow-creatures, in which case you would do moral
service by convincing him of his error, inhumanity
continued to encourage authorship at the present rate,
obscurity would soon become a claim to immortality.
If a writer informed you that his work “filled
a literary void,” his conceit was reprehensible,
and on moral grounds he ought to be chastised; if
he told you that he had only “yielded to the
urgent request of his friends,” it was only fair
to insinuate that his friends must have had very long
ears. Nevertheless, Dannevig’s reviews
were for about a month a very successful feature of
our paper. They might be described as racy little
essays, bristling with point and epigram, on some subject
suggested by the title-pages of current volumes.
At the end of that time, however, books began to grow
scarce in our office, and before another month was
at an end, we had no more need of a reviewer.
My friend was then to have his last trial as a reporter.

One of his first experiences in this new capacity
was at a mass-meeting preceding an important municipal
election. Not daring to send his “copy”
to the printer without revision, I determined to sacrifice
two or three hours’ sleep, and to await his return.
But the night wore on, the clock struck twelve, one,
and two, and no Dannevig appeared. I began to
grow anxious; our last form went to press at four
o’clock, and I had left a column and a half open
for his expected report. Not wishing to resort
to dead matter, I hastily made some selections from
a fresh magazine, and sent them to the foreman.